ring e he ead f ohn he aptist

Quick post-script to last week, I did make a mess of it, but I honestly couldn't unravel a lot of those clues and once the answer was up, I did my usual routine of getting an answer at a time to see if I could have figured it out. I hadn't heard of the book nor the author (note to setters, the George challenge - the first setter to work in a Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Terry Pratchett or Robert Rankin theme wins me doing a video version of this blog declaring you awesome).

Oh, video blogs - I'm meant to start making them for a comedy project, so once I get the hang of them, I might add some vocality to this nonsense. George versus the Listener breaking all boundaries.

Now to this week - Centigram is back! And there's some more jumbles, down answers have missing words, 25 needs to be removed and replaced by some new words and there's two mystery squares. All tied in to a performance.

I started by hitting the downs - I read somewhere recently (was it Times for the Times) that you should start crosswords in the bottom right hand corner, also known as Florida, because by that point the setter has lost inspiration. In this case it seemed like a sensible place to start because that's where the performance lies, so I started with 41 down and worked myself up.

41: looked like it was going to be OCA or COC - Chambers confirms the first, so we have an E at the end of the performance
39: I in O,D,N and we've got our God and Cretan as the extra word
37: E,PIC and New is the extra word... with NCE confirmed I think we're headed to a dance
34: Let's test that logic out... remove appoints... LOCUM? LUM is a hat and it's back-patting time.
32: Well assuming I remove the DO.... ----NG? Actually this was one of the last in.

Certainly looks like dance, maybe RIVERDANCE (Michael Flatulence only has two names though), or TAP DANCE (KELLEY, ASTAIRE, DAVIS JR?). Thinking this would be a breeze since I'm looking for dancers and had cold-solved four of five turned out to be false hope, the rest of the cold solving only gave me another 10 or so of the down clues, and with B-OT-E-S it looked like there was going to be BROTHERS in the middle. I don't know any dancing brothers, and Google turns up some unlikely candidates.

So it was time to bite the bullet, stop trying to solve this entirely on the downs and get stuck into acrosses. My printed sheets are a mess, because I put the letters I thought I knew next to the clues.

I got off to a so-so start on the acrosses - I got 1 (T,ACTLESS), but was convinved 7 was SCRAP (since I had REVEL and POTATO), so it kept me from seeing IMPS and ENTICE that I should have gotten on the first go around.

So it was solve acrosses, back to downs, solve acrosses, back to downs... you can see from my grid that I put the letters I didn't know from the acrosses in (that worked out pretty well for me in Squaring the Circle and Au Contraire).

The penny drop moment was rather fun though - it was getting 2 down - CANNACH that I finally had HERO-(M or S)BROTHERS - and realise it was HEROD'S BROTHER'S and the last word had to be DAUGHTER.

I had S-LO-E in that second row with the closed-off square, so in went SALOME, allowing me to get M(EL)ONS (EL for O in MOONS), convince myself that 10 really was ENT,ICE and that SCRAP was wrong (I must have been firing on zero cylinders, because it took entering PIRE + 1 letter into Quinapius to see TRIPE).

25 was THE SEVEN VEILS (heh, they did get removed), which helped me get VENTOSE (how did I not spot an anagram?), VASE and TEETER.

So the conclusion would be off coming the head of John the Baptist, into the bucket made by the other square. That would give me all real words across the middle and a fun conclusion!

Except that there were a bunch of empty squares in Florida!!!

I didn't have an entry at 28 (though now I knew it had to be a real word starting with L or S), an entry at 32 across OR down, and though I knew 40 was CONNIPTION, 45 was STRANGER and 35 RUNNER, still didn't know where those last letters fit.

Took an extra hour of dictionary hunt and pecking to find that LANDERS worked as a double definition (kinda) at 28. I was concerned I was going to have everything here but a few leftover words, but in the end I was there - a very fun and topical crossword by Centigram. I didn't notice until the end that the jumbles were made a little easier by multiple unchecked letters being the same letter (the three N's in CONNIPTION).

Seasonal victory to George! And in a bizarre coincidence (there seem to be more of those popping up lately), I went to a performance of Godspell in the time that I was working on this crossword. So here's some 70s hippy awesomeness from the film of Godspell - "By My Side".



2009 tally: George 11, Listener 2. Current streak: George 1

Feel free to leave comments (in response to recent message, you can do that by clicking on where it says "n comments", and see you next week for an indication of height!

Defeatism

Some weeks you've got it, some weeks you don't...

Last year there was this really fun Listener by Zero that had the shape of a space invader. Before that was a map of Italy that I couldn't make head or tail of. Now we've got to divide clues up into three groups - 21 leading to wordplay with one letter omitted, 16 clues with extra words, and 17 normal clues. Sounds tricky to begin with, because there's nothing to rely on. Each clue had to have a correct definition, so that was foremost in my mind. There's also to be some highlighting in the end, so following what we've seen from Zero, there's probably something amusing to the highlighting finale.

But this was just one I could not get into. Time has not been in plentiful supply, and being able to snatch a few furtive minutes at a time just was not going to cut it for this. To make matters worse, I lost my original grid while I was travelling (I found it yesterday when I was cleaning out some folders - that's the one I have at the top), and had to start again - at least I remembered that I had to figure out how to spell BODHISATTVA. Here's as far as I got with Grid #2.



I didn't get close enough to start guessing at the theme... all the missing letters I found were Rs and Es, not sure if that was significant, and the extra words were LOVER, FLASH, FLAKE, INITIATE, and ELECTRICIAN. Nothing came to mind, and I ran out of time with one of the emptiest grids in a while.

I'm sure I was missing something simple (or just needed more time - or brain cells, or both), but I feel bad about this paltry effort. Victory to Zero and the Listener Crossword!

2009 tally: Listener 2, George 10. Current streak: Listener 1

Since it's Easter and Passover, let's have some religious music (to go with Corn Mo from last week). Here's the updated version of "Jesus was Way Cool" by King Missile III, from the excellent and overlooked CD "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life"

Hava Notherbeera!

Gnomon is a new setter to me, the Listener website lists a 2004 puzzle that I don't remember trying. I had a long trip a few weeks ago so saved this one to start on the plane. Not a bad one to try on a plane, since I didn't need a lot of aids to get a reasonably-full grid. Spotting the theme took forever!

Well I like beer and I thought "hey cool, a Listener about beer". The instructions seemed pretty straightforward, particularly when seeing that 1 across was M,A,L,T and we've actually got a brewing ingredient and there's no trickiness to the title. 3 down looked like it should be TEAM, but I couldn't work out how to remove one letter to get it from the wordplay. Do I have to remove all occurrences of one letter from the wordplay part? Hmmm... moving on.

The rest of the ingredients were easy to find - YEA(S,T) at 28, (SHOPPER - PER)* to get HOPS at 29 and (A PEWTER TANKARD - E DRANK)* to get TAP WATER (presumably the ingredient you wouldn't want to own up to) at 38. By the end of my flight, I had almost all of the bottom half complete, sort of.

Sort of... I was using definitions to get grid answers. Some wordplays weren't making sense, and it seemed like a bunch of random letters had to be removed, usually from anagram clues. I scanned the whole of the first page, and the second page looked like it as well, riddled with letter combinations, trying to figure out how to remove a letter to get these.

Take 17, for example... definition leading to LANAI, but the anagram fodder is LANAI + MME. Even if I cut both M's, that's not going to work.

Frustration really set in when I had more than two-thirds of the grid completed without having picked the theme at all. I was wondering if I could just finish the grid from definitions and make up a 5-letter brewing ingredient... SUGAR? COTWO?

The penny finally dropped when working on one of the empty spaces... the definition at 23 looked like it should have been TALUS, and there's that weird KHUSKHUS word in there... hmmm

tSAMEalKHs. SAMEKH? That's a Hewbrew letter isn't it? D'OH!!!!!!! tHE BREWer's ingredients.

I should have been all over that... last year a friend of mine who owns a beer store (and who wouldn't be my friend if they run a beer store?) introduced me to He'Brew, the chosen beer. They have one beer that is insanely hoppy that I loved, and can be found on tap at the Burp Castle in New York City's East Village (Ilan, if you're reading, next time I'm in NYC we'll coordinate things better to get a beer).



So I'm not removing English letters, I'm removing Hebrew letters, and there's 22 in the alphabet!!! Interesting that they specified 5 letters, since there's not many 5-letter Hebrew characters.

Bad move #1 - I went to google to get a Hebrew alphabet and found that there were a bunch of different phonetic spellings. I wrote down the one from (even worse) wikipedia, and found that the first clue I was going to try to re-unravel, 40 across (VAKEEL + SIN) didn't have a match on the wikipedia alphabet.

Doofus - there's a perfectly good Hebrew alphabet in Chambers! And it has SIN in it!

Write out the Hebrew alphabet from Chambers and we're back in action. I was actually missing two letters, NUN and ZAYIN (the only Z I could find in any clues was in 43 across). I suspect NUN has to be removed from 6 down? So that leaves me with ZAYIN, which I don't think has anything to do with brewing, but is the lucky last letter, and in it goes.

I thought this was going to be a breeze, but got really trapped until the very very late penny-drop moment. Fun puzzle from Gnomon, but victory to George! I know I'm getting better at methodically working through clues, but I'm still stunned by my record thus far.

2009 tally: George 10, Listener 1. Current streak, George 4.

Finishing this off I was reminded of a Corn Mo show where he did "Hava Nagila Monster". There's no great recordings of it online, here's a handheld from a reasonably quiet show. If you're drinking Bittersweet Lemmy's R.I.P.A. at Burp Castle, try to catch a Corn Mo show, he often performs in the NYC area.

Feel free to leave a comment, and see you next week for some elitism!

A puzzle with a C4 point group!

Back when I was a very casual attempter at the Listener, I did manage to complete one of Waterloo's crosswords (3959: And Now We Are Twelve), and a fair bit of 3928: OO Spectacles. I found working through the solution to the latter one of those really fun and enlightening.

An Additional Symmetry appeals to me straight away - I have a great interest in symmetry and topology, and this puzzle fits into the C₄ point group - everything can be rotated by 90 degrees including the orientation of the clue numbers. Fun!

In the effort of wanting to seem like a symmetry smartypants I tried to complete the gridlines before I even got going. And following the unwritten rule, (s)PORTED is the answer to 1 across, and in we go. 2 down probably crosses with 1 across, and is D,(r)ETRO,P. Write it in as 2 down checking the D at the end of PORTED. Should be able to fill in a few now... I had 6 as PORTER thinking it was a triple definition, but much more confident on 36 as EL,IDE(a)S. So 35 down has to start with S... SEDILE (LID rev in SEE), good good.

Hey, DE TROP is PORTED reversed, and SEDILE is ELIDES reversed... is there going to be additional additional symmetry? Might it be crazy enough that the four quadrants themselves have some sort of symmetry? If that is true, then I probably have some six-letter words joining up to thr outer squares... 15 across looks like EG,I,L in MP (finding out that David Cameron is the leader of the opposition in England right now), and that would fit tantalisingly with that P in PORTED.

And this is where I came to a grinding halt. I had a bunch more words, but I couldn't make them fit, particularly ARMCHAIR which was one of the first cold solves I got, wouldn't cross anywhere that made sense. I had another grid that tried to force these words in but I think I threw it out, I meant to trash it... the grid you see above was returning to the ones I was sure of at this point.

Oh... what if these reversals of each other are meant to go on top of each other? Then the grid opens out more... That would make PORTER wrong, since I had (he)REWARD for 18 down it would be DRAWER (double definition). Start again!



Things started settling into place nicely when I figured that out. The big steps were fitting in the eight 5-letter entries that started at the same numbers into the words around the outside. I had to hunt and peck to find the last few words (IGARAPE, TRENCHARD, GARRY OWEN), but once the symmetry was in place, things fell out in a rapid tumble.

A very fun puzzle that was right up my alley, there's been a few of those lately, and nearly caught me. Victory to George! 2009 tally: George 9, Listener 1. Current streak: George 3.

12 pentominos walk into a bar

And 90 minutes later walk out with a completed crossword!

I've not had much of a run of luck with Oyler's numerical puzzles, being unable to finish the last two. But I liked the look of this one, it fit my interest in symmetry and topology, so I printed it off and headed to the bar with a good feeling.

Now before I left I did a little cheating and worked out the prime factors for each of the rows and columns which were not zero.

I started with the left side, switched to the right, and worked back to the middle. It was pretty generous, looking for primes first, the 11s had to be a U-shaped bit across columns 1-3. I could place the 2s and 7s from where the 11s were. Then switching to the other side, where row 12 had to be 10, 10, 10, 6, 6 and backwards from there.

I had the pentominos placed in less than an hour, and the shading figured out in another 20 minutes or so. Done!

The coloring was done starting with the 7s - choosing one color for them, meant that the 2s and 0s had to be other colors - using the 7 color for the 9s, I could use the 0 color for the 11s and back to the 2s color for the 5s. Making sure the colors alternate around the 1s gave me the rest of the shading.

This was a lot of fun, and I'd write a lot more but I'm pressed for time, so I'll put my solving notes underneath. Put your nose close to the screen and you can probably smell Asheville Brewing Company's Old School Pale Ale. The last two numerical crosswords have fallen squarely into my comfort zone, so the next one will probably trip me up altogether!

Victory to George! 2009 tally: George 8, Listener 1. Current streak: George 2.

See you next week for further adventures in symmetry!

See you in 'ELL

To me, Hotspur is a new setter - the Listener website shows four previous crosswords, three along similar themes, but I haven't tried any of them. 31 misprints in definitions out of 58 clues, so a little more than half of them, a literary work and two sets of words. I'm not always good at matching sets, but let's head on with this.

OK, so 1 across looks like it should be AFRICAN and I'm after a literary work starting with Z for Zulu

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance? Too many letters.

What else? Googling literary works beginning with Z doesn't seem to be throwing up many contenders. OK, I know I probably shouldn't be looking for the theme after solving one clue, but that Z is so tempting. How about some more clues.

More than half of the clues have misprints, so be on the lookout for them. 15 is a really nice clue for NAPOLEON (P,OLEO in NAN), but there's no misprint there. In 16 "ARIS" is sticking out as a likely misprinted word, could be IRIS or AXIS, though if it was AXIS then I'm looking for a literary work with Z and X in the first word. Crazy...

21 is C,RIBS and misprint H, so we have the possibility of Z, X, and H. Is this work going to be in English?

I like 24 - BEL,TWAY - I am heading to Charlotte shortly and there's a really annoying beltway around it that I'll be spending more time on than I really want.

27 is good old ANSATE (anagram), no misprint. There's probably a glut of misprints coming up.

And 30 is another one - R for M in MOISTER and we have ROISTER and another misprint.

These misprints are rather playful - in 52 across SE(x),AN(s),CE and GOFER becomes GONER, hehehehe

Now the penny drop moment came in a rather amusing fashion - I had about a two-thirds filled grid, and my misprints read Z X RA T ERSI EA R O B O (I now know that the B was wrong, I had creature that was BOILED for 29 down). I had been snowed in a couple of days lately, so I was getting to a few video games that had been sitting unplayed, and one of them was "The Simpsons Game". In this game, the levels are parodies of video games and other literary works... take a look at what Level 15 (the second last level) was...



I tried to get a shot of me and the crossword in front of the TV, but if the flash came on you couldn't see the screen, so we're both pretty dark. Ahhh video games, what can't you do?

So that Z is an S (SUSU), and I managed to get the rest of the definitions in order by matching the letters from the title SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR, and PIRANDELLO going down the main diagonal (this also helped me to get SORD and TALLY).

In the play, the six characers are a father, a mother, a son, a stepdaughter, a boy and a child... but before I started down that path - FRANKESNTEIN is poking out at me in 2 down - and SHELLEY can be made from an indirect route of the letters in the bottom right.

NAPOLEON was the pig in "Animal Farm" by George ORWELL and the ELL (also part of PIRANDELLO) are where they meet. And an ELL is an arm's length of fabric! Woohoo, we're nearly there.

There's some other "charactery" looking words in this grid, do they have ELL authors? "KIPPS - the story of a simple soul by" by H.G. WELLES. "HERZOG" by Saul BELLOW. "BELINDA" by Hilaire BELLOC.

The last one is giving me agony... SMOLLETT used JENKINS as a character in some stories, and would fit the ELL, but I can't find anywhere to fit the rest of the name. Let's keep the fingers crossed on this one.

I'm calling this one a guarded victory - took a lot of slogging through, but the penny drop moment was one of the best. 2009 tally: George 7, Listener 1. Current streak: George 1.

Pleasures don't get much guiltier than this - DragonForce have just announced that they are doing a concert in my little town in April. Better start growing and dyeing my hair now. Guitar metal geekines doesn't get geekier - here's "Heroes of Our Time" - comments welcome, and see you next week for some numerical fun and games.

Boustrawhatnow?

All good things must come to and end, and it's my streak.

I haven't tried any of Salamanca's crosswords other than the last (?) two of the "Plays of the Bard" series that I got nowhere on. So I was expecting something difficult, and I got it. First off, I had to look up Boustrophedon which means "alternately right to left and left to right" which doesn't seem to make much sense to me given that we start with 1 down? Does it mean down to up and up to down?

Then we're later switching to across. Across boustrophedon or just across? Hmmm. No letter lengths. Not every letter is checked... well since I'm lost on how these go in it's a pity not every letter is checked, I could look for letters that appear twice and hope they're forming a pattern.

What I do know is that the first clue is 1 down, presumably it starts in the first square and it is RESIDENTSHIP (anagram of THE N SPIDERS I). The second answer is either ANA or ANAIA, and with cold solving I'm stuck until (g)HOST.

Hmmm... if they're in across order near the end, then maybe I can start at the end and work up.

The very last clue is an anagram - PACKTHREAD. Maybe crosses with the P in RESIDENTSHIP? Try it... ANA or ANAIA could go up from the A in PACKTHREAD?

Is the second-last clue a two-letter word (please?). No, it's TONDINI. Hmmm... now if it went in backwards then maybe it crosses that I and N from RESIDENTSHIP and ANA, but that makes an ugly DK at the end of column 4. If the acrosses are normal, then maybe HOST rises from the H in PACKTHREAD and TONDINI crosses there? That would make the one above it most likely a 4-letter word for "something to sleep on" beginning IN... (in case Peter B is reading, I tried INRO as the stock 4-letter word beginning IN, but it doesn't work). I look for places for my other longish words that I think are in the across section (AU NATUREL, UNTAMES) to cross longish and weirdish words that I think are in the boustrophedon part (AUSPICE, MBIRA, BEDROCK, AKIRA), but it's not working.

I am completely stumped... I'm heading over to the listener site soon to see what it was I missed, but I just completely cannot get started on this one. Well done Salamanca, victory to the Listener Crossword.

2009 tally: Listener 1, George 6. Current streak: Listener 1

While I was toying with this, I was reading about a group I've performed for a few times, Arts2People doing a Labyrinth-themed ball in Asheville. So it would be a perfect finish for this puzzle if you had to go all around a bunch of hedges avoiding David Bowie and his creepy hair and camel toe. Let's all paint our toenails black and relive (if you're my age) your childhood with some David Bowie.



Comments welcome, and see you next week!